Bhagat Singh Study is a blog to know about great Indian martyr Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries of the world, who played a historic role in shaping the destiny of Indian nation and the world. Bhagat Singh and Che Guevara like revolutionaries are the icons of youth, who wish to change the world. In this blog there are photographs, documents and research material about Bhagat Singh and other revolutionaries of the world.

Monday, 14 March 2016

I was searching for Dr. Ambedkar's writings on Bhagat Singh, since 2006, when I suddenly recovered Periyar's editorial on Bhagat Singh in 29th March 1931 issue of his Tamil weekly-'Kudai Arsu', while visiting Periyar Tiddle in Chennai. The editorial was translated into English after 75 years of its first publication in Tamil at my request and was published in October 2006 issue of 'The Rationalist', which has been included in my two books-Jail Notebook and Other writings of Bhagat Singh and Understadnign Bhagat Singh.

On 30th January this year I met Subodh More, grand son of historic 1927 Mahad movement account writer R B More, who informed about 'Janta' editorial of Dr. Ambedkar in 1931. He was kind enough to send me the copy of it, which I requested Anand Teltumbde to translate in English and Subhas Gatade in Hindi. Both have been kind enough to provide me English and Hindi translation of the editorial, which is being shared here in both the languages, thanks to Subodh Moe, Anand Teltumbde and Subhas Gatade.

Three Victims-Dr. Ambedkar editorial on Bhagat Singh
execution

(Janata dated 13 April 1931)

Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev
and Rajguru have been eventually hanged. They were charged for the murders of
an English police officer named Sanders and a Sikh police sepoy named Chaman
Singh. Also there were three or four additional charges such as an attempt of
murdering one police inspector at Banaras, throwing a bomb in the Assembly,
conducting robbery at a house in Maulimiya village and looting its valuables.
Bhagatsingh had already admitted to the charges of throwing bomb in the
Assembly. For this crime, he and Batukeshwar Dutt were already sentenced with
life imprisonment. One of the comrades of Bhagatsingh by name Jaigopal had
confessed that the murder of sanders was executed by them revolutionaries
including Bhagatsingh and others. The government had filed a case against
Bhagatsingh and his comrades based on this confession. None of the three
accused participated in this case, however. A special tribunal comprising three
high court judges was appointed which heard the case and unanimously awarded
them death penalty.

Bhagatsingh’s father had made a mercy petition to the
Emperor and the Viceroy requesting them not to execute the punishment and
convert if required into life imprisonment at Andamans. Many people including
prominent leaders also tried to plead with the government in the matter. The
issue of Bhagatsingh’s death penalty might have arisen in negotiations that
took place between Gandhi and Lord Irwin. Although Lord Irwin had not given any
definitive assurance about saving Bhagatsingh’s life, Gandhi’s speech during
the intervening period created a hope that Irwin would try his best within his
powers to save lives of these three youth. But all these hopes, predictions and
appeals proved futile. They were killed by hanging in the Central Prison,
Lahore on 23 March 1931 at 7 pm. None of them had made any appeal for saving
them. But as it is already published, Bhagatsingh had expressed a desire for
being killed with bullet shots instead of hanging by the neck. But even this
last will of his was not granted and they implemented the judgment of the
tribunal verbatim. The judgement was to hang by the neck till dead. If they
were killed with bullet shots, the execution would not confirm to the judgement
verbatim. The order of the justice goddess was obeyed in toto and the three
were killed with the method she prescribed.

For whom the Sacrifice?

If the government thinks that people would be impressed by
its display of devotion to and strict obedience of the justice goddess and
therefore they would approve of this killing, it would be its utter naiveté.
None believes that this sacrifice was made with only intention of maintaining
clean and sans blemish reputation of the British justice system. Even the
government will not be able to convince itself with such an understanding. Then
how will it convince others with this veil of the justice goddess? The entire
world, as well as the government does, knows that it is not the devotion to
justice goddess but the fear of the conservative party and public opinion back
home in England that this sacrifice was executed. They thought, the
unconditional release of political prisoners like Gandhi and signing pacts with
Gandhi’s party has damaged the prestige of the Empire. Some orthodox leaders of
the conservative party have launched a campaign that the prevailing cabinet of
the Labour Party and the Viceroy who danced to its tune were responsible for
it. In such a situation if Lord Irwin had showed mercy to political
revolutionaries who have been convicted for assassinating an English officer,
it would be like giving a burning torch into the hands of the opposition
leaders. Already the condition of the Labour Party is not stable. In such a
situation if these conservative leaders got an alibi that the labour government
grants clemency to the convicts, who had murdered an Englishman, it would be so
easy to provoke public opinion against it. In order to avert this imminent
crisis and to thwart the fire in the minds of conservative leaders from flaring
further, these hangings were executed.

As such this was not to satisfy the justice goddess but to
please public opinion in England. If it had been the issue of personal liking
or disliking of Lord Irwin, he would have within his own powers annulled the
death penalty and awarded life imprisonment in its stead. The cabinet of the
Labour Party in England would have supported Lord Irwin in this decision. It
would have been necessary to maintain congeniality of public opinion in the
context of Gandhi-Irwin pact. While leaving the country, Lord Irwin would
surely have liked to earn this goodwill. But he would have been crushed between
the ire of his conservative kin in England and the Indian bureaucracy imbued
with the same casteist attitude. Therefore, not minding the public opinion here
the government of Lord Irwin hanged Bhagatsingh and his comrades to death and
that too just 2 to 4 days before the Karachi conference of the Congress. Both,
the hanging of Bhagatsingh and his comrades, and its timings, were sufficient
to puncture the Gandhi-Irwin Pact and to trash the efforts to bring it about.
If Lord Irwin wanted to fail this pact, he would not have found better act than
this one. Looking from this perspective, as Gandhiji also felt, one could say
that the government committed a great blunder.

In sum, merely not to incur anger of the conservatives in
England, they sacrificed Bhagatsingh and his comrades ignoring public opinion
and not minding what would happen to the Gandhi-Irwin pact. The government must
remember, howsoever it tries to cover it up or polish it; it will never be able
to hide this fact.

Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst and an
activist with CPDR, Mumbai

In defence of a revolutionary

Eighty-five years after the hanging of Bhagat Singh, lawyers from India and Pakistan have joined hands to re-open, and overturn, the sham trial that led to his death. Why does the revolutionary remain politically relevant to both countries?

In a dark, poky room that constitutes his chamber in the new block of the Supreme Court, Delhi, Nafis Siddiqui, a 77-year-old criminal lawyer, has been preparing for a most unorthodox case for the last two years. As part of his research, he has been reading up on cases where verdicts have been upended after long periods of time. He cites the case of George Stinney, a young boy, exonerated 70 years after his death by a court in US (in 2014), that found he was denied due process. Siddiqui points out another relevant trial; the ongoing legal battle between the British government and victims of Kenya’s Mau Mau emergency, who are demanding compensation 50 years after the events. “When it comes to infringement of fundamental rights, a delay in the matter is of no consequence,” he says.

With loose-flowing white hair, thick-framed glasses and oversized black coat, Siddiqui is an idiosyncratic figure. He pulls out a thick brown folder marked “Bhagat Singh”, with whom he has grown to be familiar through history books and family lore — Siddiqui’s father-in-law, Hasrat Mohani, a freedom fighter, communist and poet, credited for coining the slogan, “Inquilab Zindabad!”, had a great influence on the revolutionary. “I mostly handle cases of murder, and this is clearly a case of political murder,” he says.

Eighty-five years after the hanging of Bhagat Singh, a lawyer from Pakistan is trying to pull off what is either an audacious attempt to change the course of history, or a fool’s errand. In 2014, Siddiqui was approached by Lahore-based Imtiaz Rashid Qureshi — who has been fighting a lone battle to prove the innocence of Bhagat Singh — to advise him on his case. Qureshi’s petition, which was filed at the Lahore High Court in 2013, seeks to reopen the case of the hanging of Singh and his compatriots, Sukhdev Thapar and Shivaram Rajguru, whose death anniversary will be celebrated on March 23 as Martyrs’ Day. In February this year, a two-member division bench in Lahore referred the case to a larger bench. For Qureshi, who argued that only a bench of three or more members could undo the decision of the three-member bench that awarded the death sentence in 1930, it was a moment of victory.

The first breakthrough came in 2014 when the court handed him a copy of the original FIR for the murder of British police officer John Saunders lodged at Lahore’s Anarkali police station in December 1928. The FIR does not name any of the three accused.

This is just one of the many discrepancies of the Lahore Conspiracy Case, which lasted for nearly two years and is universally recognised as a sham trial. As AG Noorani detailed in his book, The Trial of Bhagat Singh, from the lower court to the tribunal to the Privy Council, it was a judgment that represented a total compromise of the legal process.

The accused remained absent through the proceedings and remained unrepresented. Halfway through the trial, an Indian judge, deemed sympathetic to the accused, was removed from the tribunal. Many other rules of law were flouted. In a scathing editorial that appeared in April 1931, in the Marathi newspaper Janata, soon after the hanging, BR Ambedkar called out the hypocrisy of the British who manipulated the trial for political ends.

“We are demanding two things, that the British government, through the Queen, apologise to both our countries, and pay compensation to the families of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev,” says Qureshi over the phone from Lahore. Loquacious and deeply committed to the cause, he calls himself a “lover of Bhagat Singh” and runs a memorial in his name, the Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation. “This is a case that unites the two countries and it proves that Pakistan, an Islamic state, can also be liberal. Let’s not forget the Quaid-e-Azam was the only leader to have publicly defended him.” In a speech he gave in the Central Assembly in 1929, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had famously expressed his sympathy for the revolutionaries.

Qureshi’s pursuit has had a ripple effect in India. In Ludhiana, the descendants of Sukhdev Thapar have recently written to the Indian government, demanding a copy of the FIR and papers related to the judgment. Ashok Thapar, (a great-nephew, his grandfather was the younger brother of Sukhdev), who runs the Shaheed Sukhdev Thapar Memorial Trust, says, “We want government support to go to Lahore and pursue this case, or we will file an RTI. As his blood relations, we have a claim.”

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More than perhaps the verdict, the reopening of the trial is crucial for another reason. There is renewed hope that the court will order the release of about 164 files related to the case, which are with the Punjab Archives in Lahore. They have been treated as “sensitive”, and no historian or researcher has ever been allowed to access them, says Ludhiana-based Jagmohan Singh, a researcher on Bhagat Singh. He also happens to be Bhagat Singh’s nephew, born to his sister Bibi Amar Kaur. But, unlike the sustained campaign around the declassification of theNetaji files, these files have been neglected. Yet, they are a crucial part of setting the record straight.

“The trial may or may not change history, but it’s the right of the people to know what happened, and those files will help us get there,” says Shantanu Rajguru, a great-grandnephew of Shivaram Rajguru. The family lives in Pune and is currently putting together a biography on the revolutionary. It was Rajguru, known as the marksman of the group, who fired the shot that killed Saunders. But Rajguru, like Sukhdev (who was in charge of coordinating the operation to avenge the death of Lala Lajpat Rai), has been reduced to a footnote in history, believes Shantanu. The descendants of Sukhdev believe that the retrial should not be held in the name of Singh alone.*****Apart from the context of historicity, the trial is significant as a measure of the democratic struggle in Pakistan being led by the civil society. The effort to reinstate Bhagat Singh as an icon has gathered force in recent times, as he has emerged as a symbol for the secularists in their battle against illiberal forces. Singh belongs to the pantheon of heroes of the Indian subcontinent. He is venerated in Punjab where he was born. “The PIL is an important political and historical development in a country and a region where history is often distorted in textbooks, held hostage to nationalist expediencies and heroes like Bhagat Singh are simply whitewashed or relegated to a footnote,” says Raza Naeem, a social scientist and activist from Lahore, over an email interview.

While there is no official celebration of his martyrdom day in Pakistan, every year, on March 23, there is a gathering of activists at Shadman Chowk, next to Lahore Jail, where he was executed. Since 2001, there has been a movement demanding Shadman Chowk be renamed Bhagat Singh Chowk. The government agreed a few years ago, but capitulated when Islamist groups objected to the icon on grounds of his religious identity. In a conciliatory move last year, the government announced a package of Rs 8 crore, for the restoration of his ancestral house in Faisalabad district.

“I have attended the annual gathering at the chowk for a few years and every year, the movement has grown,” says Haroon Khalid, Pakistani author and journalist. “It is now part of the broader debate that seeks to widen the horizons of Pakistani nationalism by incorporating non-Muslim heroes as well. Another interesting dynamic of this movement is that it also comes at a time when the Pakistani state actively wants to re-project itself as a liberal secular state. There has been particular focus on the protection and promoting of Sikh heritage in the country. Bhagat Singh is seen in that broader framework of this Sikh heritage,” he says.*****“Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking,” wrote Bhagat Singh in his essay ‘Why I am an Atheist’, when he was in jail in Lahore.

In a curious echo of events across the border, Bhagat Singh has been having a moment of resurgence in contemporary politics in India. On the morning of February 25, Jantar Mantar in Delhi, where the dissatisfactions of the public are registered everyday, is in its usual state of melee. Among the many protests, rallies, dharnas and fasts, one smaller agitation has been drawing the attention of people for its fiery sloganeering. Cries of “inquilab” rend the air.

The Joint Action Committee for Bhagat Singh Airport (made up of Left party workers and citizenry) is holding a day-long protest. For the last few months, the new international airport in Chandigarh has been a point of dispute between the governments of Haryana and Punjab, after the present BJP-ruled Haryana government proposed naming it after an RSS functionary, Mangal Sein, and went back on an earlier commitment to name it after the martyr. JNU Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar in his by-now famous “anti-national” speech had raised the subject of the airport.

Through the speeches at Jantar Mantar — in which many left leaders likenRohith Vemula and Kanhaiya Kumar to Bhagat Singh — it is clear that the revolutionary has become a part of the overheated debate around iconography that has been going on since the BJP government has taken over. As student protests have spread across campuses in the country, and with charges ofsedition flying thick and fast, the revolutionary’s legacy, of rebellion, sacrifice, fearlessness, has been repeatedly invoked. “Bhagat Singh is a dangerous character for Indian rulers, specially his ideas,” says political scientist Shamsul Islam.

Chaman Lal, a former professor at JNU and biographer of Bhagat Singh, has travelled from Ludhiana to Delhi to join the protest. In his speech, he says, the country needs Singh now more than ever. “The fight has become so tough, that we need harder icons, like Ambedkar, Periyar, Subhash Chandra Bose and Bhagat Singh, and not pacifists like Gandhi,” he tells us, after the protest winds up. Lal’s life has been dedicated to propagating the ideas of Bhagat Singh. “Across the country, and particularly in the north, he is celebrated as a brave, fearless hero, like Che Guevara.“But, we have adopted Bhagat Singh, without adopting his ideas.” He was a reader (at the age of 19, he had read Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and borrowed more than 400 books in jail) and a writer (he wrote prolifically during his incarceration). “He was a socialist and an atheist, a thinker-revolutionary,” says Lal.

For the family of Bhagat Singh, the trial represents an ethical dilemma. The martyr was opposed to the appeal that was filed to the Privy Council to save his life. “Will we be going against his wishes?” questions Abhey Sandhu, the son of Bhagat Singh’s younger brother Kulbir Singh. But the one thing he desired for was for his ideas to take root. The trial may represent that hope. As Sandhu says, “We might be his direct descendants, but in a way, we are all descendants of Bhagat Singh, especially those who propagate his thoughts.”

- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/freedom-fighter-bhagat-singh-inquilab-zindabad-supreme-court-nafis-siddiqui-george-stinney-hasrat-mohani-in-defence-of-a-revolutionary/#sthash.gf4lVmh2.uUfMiWkB.dpuf